Projections 2009

The Association of Bay Area Governments is responsible for making long-term forecasts or population, housing, and employment for the nine-county Bay Area. These forecasts assist local governments in planning for our changing environment.

ABAG produces updated forecasts every 2 years and publishes them as Projections. In recent updates, the Projections forecasts have presented a realistic assessment of growth in the region, while recognizing trends in markets and demographics, while also recognizing local policies that promote more compact infill- and transit-oriented development.

ABAG's Projections 2009 and related documents are available from the ABAG Webstore:

New for 2009
For Projections 2009, we used "Performance Targets" to identify environmental, land-use and transportation related impacts of growth. Also developed alternative land use scenarios to test how well we can address and balance these objectives through land use policies. To accomplish this, we held 40 meetings around the region to discuss get input on the targets and land use scenarios.

Performance Targets
The Performance targets are not mandates; rather, they provide a measuring stick to see how well we can utilize growth and development to achieve regional transportation, equity, and environmental objectives, including reducing green house gas causing carbon emissions.

Alternative Scenarios
In the Fall of 2008, we developed two land use scenarios, to test how well we can address and balance these objectives through land use policies. Each scenarios had varying degrees of land use assumptions. We tested the scenarios against the targets to determine how well they perform and presented the scenarios and their results to local governments and stakeholder groups and to the Joint Policy Committee and ABAG's Executive Board. For more detail on the alternative scenarios and the results of our analysis, see ABAG's document Projections 2009: What If?

Meetings and Outreach
Because this year's Projections process is significantly different than prior years, ABAG staff developed a comprehensive schedule of meetings to provide outreach and collect input from planning staffs, elected officials, and other stakeholder groups. Beginning in March 2008, we began a series of outreach meetings to lay out our strategy and begin discussing the targets and land use scenarios. Subsequent meetings focused on details of the two scenarios and the results of our performance target analysis. In February 2009, ABAG staff hosted a workshop to present our draft Projections and solicit additional feedback from local jurisdictions. For details on the Meetings and Outreach, click on the Outreach / Meetings link on the left.

We used feedback from local governments, stakeholder groups, the region's Joint Policy Committee and ABAG's Executive Board to develop the final Projections 2009 scenario, approved by ABAG's Executive Board in March 2009.